Introduction

Where social or state protection for the aged is weak or inadequate in contexts of steadily eroding age-based hierarchies, secure property right over resources could turn into a crucial dimension of social security. Where age-based hierarchies were strong, dramatic, if highly uneven, social transformations since the colonial period have meant important shifts in family ideology and practices. In the Indian context, immovable property such as land and house have been owned largely by men and devolved among men, the only exceptions being matrilineal societies on the southwest coast and in the north-east (Agarwal, 1994). Despite differences in ‘law’ on a religious basis, which gained coherence through the use of religion to codify and evolve law during the colonial period, customs varied according to region and contiguity of communities. Thus, women's right to property under Islamic law, which provided daughters a lesser share than it did sons but protected that share against testation, was subject to the operation of custom which privileged the dominant practice in the region. Transformation of family relations among ‘Hindus’ through colonial legal interpretation and reform of personal law in the mid 1950s shifted the basis of women's property rights from the category of age to marital status i.e., unmarried daughters, wives and widows (Agnes, 1999). However, the process of transformation since the colonial period also weakened the position of aged men by allowing greater recognition of individual rights very generally over that of the corporate family, which gave aged men greater customary authority.